Lazy Exploits

by Andrew BrokosTwo
Plus Two Magazine, Vol. 14, No. 5

A lot of my writing about poker strategy these days draws on game theory. For that matter, lot of my poker studying these days draws on game theory, which is to say that it takes as a starting point an understanding of what an equilibrium strategy for a given situation might look like.

This can be controversial. There’s a segment of the poker community that insists that because many real world opponents are blatantly exploitable, studying equilibrium strategies is a waste of time. Don’t worry about “balance”, the argument goes. Most of your opponents will be so blatantly exploitable that you should just go ahead and exploit them.

I don’t disagree that most real world opponents have extremely exploitable tendencies, nor that employing highly exploitive strategies ought to be one’s goal. However, I’ve found that focusing on exploitability in a vacuum leads to sloppy, sub-optimal play. Some bluffs are so profitable that they will make money even against a so-called “calling station”. Sometimes the best way to size your value bets against such players is on the smaller side. If you focus on simple heuristics like “Don’t bluff loose players” or “This player is sick of folding to me, better wait for a ‘real hand’ before I bet into him”, you’re going to miss these spots.

When I actually playpoker, I rarely attempt to approximate an equilibrium strategy. Such a strategy is, rather, exactly what I said above: a starting point. It enables me to answer questions like: How thinly can I value bet against an equilibrium opponent? How often should I bluff? Which hands would be very profitable bluffs, and which would break even against an equilibrium calling strategy? Armed with this knowledge, I can make more fine-grained assessments of exactly how much to deviate from the equilibrium strategy in order to exploit the mistakes I expect a particular opponent to make.

Semi-bluffs are a great example of what I’m talking about. Strong draws actually have a lot in common with strong made hands, in the sense that there’s almost no way for your opponent to make it unprofitable for you to bet them. They benefit so much from getting folds, and yet still have so much equity when called or raised, that it’s just hard to go wrong betting them.

Yes, it is theoretically possible for checking or calling with these hands to be equivalent to or better than betting them. In fact, you’ll often see such hands played as a mix of bets and checks in equilibrium strategies. This is why it’s so important to understand what makes these hands such profitable bets, because in fact these are often cases where it makes more sense to be aggressive against a “calling station” than against an equilibrium strategy.

With strong semi-bluffs, you don’t much mind getting called. The only thing that really hurts is getting raised. So while it’s true that bluffing less is often a good way to exploit looseness, betting draws is often a good way to exploit passivity. And because loose players, by definition, have wider ranges than tight players, betting strong draws puts them in an impossible spot. They are going to have a lot of weak hands, so either they fold those, which means your bet benefits greatly from fold equity, or they call with them, which means that you may actually end being ahead even though you were “bluffing”.

Example One

In a $5/$10 game, a loose and passive player opened to $60 from early position. This was quite uncommon for him, and probably indicative of a strong hand, because he usually entered the pot by limping. However, because he had about $3,000 in front of him, I covered him, and I didn’t expect much three-betting from the players behind me, I called with J9.

One other player behind me called as well, and the three of us saw a T86 flop. The original raiser bet $150 into a pot of about $200, I called, and the third player folded.

The turn was the 3. He checked, and despite having a strong draw, I checked behind. My reasoning was that, based on his pre-flop raise and his bet into two players on this “scary” flop, he probably had an overpair. And while, at this stack depth, I would try to bluff some players off of an overpair on a board like this one, I decided that wasn’t a good idea against this particular player. In other words, I took the lazy route of not bluffing, even though I had an excellent bluffing hand, because I’d labeled my opponent loose.

The river was the 4 and my opponent checked again. Now, I began to doubt that he had an overpair. I hated the idea of checking and giving him a free showdown if he just had Ace-high, so I bet $125. It was an amount that I thought would cause him to fold his unpaired hands while losing the least if he did have an overpair. He called with Ace-King, and even moreso than the river bet, I sorely regretted not betting the turn.

The value of betting the turn (or raising the flop, for that matter), is not only in pressuring overpairs, though that’s certainly part of it. It lies also in pressuring, and probably getting folds from, unpaired hands like AK. Because I got sloppy and resorted to the lazy tactic of making both a strong assumption about my opponent’s hand and a strong assumption about how he’d play it, I lost a pot that I almost certainly could have won by betting the turn.

Example Two

A player in middle position opened to $30, and I called on the Button with QJ. The Big Blind raised to $110, the original raiser called, and I called. We had about $2,500 effective stacks.

The Big Blind looked like a straightforward, somewhat nitty type. He’d clearly just come from work and was sporting a button-down shirt and a neat, conservative haircut. I’d already taken a few medium-sized pots from him by raising him in spots where he figured to have just one pair, and I suspected that he was getting sick of my aggression.

The flop came T96. He bet $200 into a pot $335, the other player folded, and I called. In a vacuum, this is an excellent spot to raise against a player with a “typical” three-betting range. He’s unlikely to have a hand stronger than one pair, whereas sets and straights are very plausible for me, and we’re deep enough that it’s going to be uncomfortable at best for him to stack off with an overpair. Not to mention my truckload of equity.

As I mentioned before, the worst-case scenario would be to get raised. But with this hand, on this flop, you’ve got enough equity to get all-in if it comes to that. I decided to just call, though, reasoning, as in the first example, that this player must have an overpair, that he was too sick of me to fold it, and that if he had Kings then my equity actually wasn’t quite so hot (though it would be, importantly, still fine).

To be fair, calling isn’t terrible. There will be plenty of good opportunities for me on future streets when I call.

As it happened, the turn was the Q. My opponent checked, and I checked behind. This, I think, is pretty clearly correct. If he’s not going to fold overpairs, then there isn’t much value in betting, and I really don’t want to get raised.

The river was the 4. He checked again, and I was happy to check behind. “Pair of nines”, he declared. That in itself was a surprise, so I sat in silence, forcing him either to reveal his cards or forfeit the pot. He sheepishly turned over 93o.

Once again, my laziness in making strong assumptions based on limited evidence led to a mistake, though thankfully this time I wasn’t punished for it. There’s really no player type against whom raising the flop is going to be a big mistake. It’s at worst a breakeven-ish play, if all of my assumptions are correct, and if it turns out that I’m wrong about my opponent, then it becomes extremely profitable. That means that raising is basically a freeroll on the possibility that my assumptions are wrong.

That’s the real value of game theory that many people don’t appreciate. It doesn’t just tell you how to play against an “optimal” strategy; it tells you how to play against an unknown strategy. The more comfortable you are making assumptions about an opponent, the more you can deviate from the equilibrium strategy. But it pays to know what the equilibrium is so that you can make informed decisions about how severely to deviate and what the potential consequences are if your assumptions prove incorrect.